James Bhandary-Alexander and Alyson Heimer at WNHH FM.
In New Haven, people are proposing ideas to strengthen democracy.
In Israel, people are taking to the streets to try to save democracy.
In the process, the debate in both places cuts to fundamental questions about what democracy is all about in the first place.
That democracy wrestling was the focus of a two-segment edition Thursday of WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
The first segment featured a conversation with Alyson Heimer and James Bhandary-Alexander, administrator and a board member respectively of the New Haven Democracy Fund.
The fund offers campaign grants to qualifying mayoral candidates who agree to forswear special-interest money and individual contributions above $445. Launched in 2007, it is the state’s only municipal public-financing system.
Bhandary-Alexander said that at a time when “dark money” has imperiled democracy at the national level, the fund promotes clean elections, a bedrock of the democratic system.
The fund has submitted a proposal to the Board of Alders to update the law governing the fund based on its first 16 years of operation. The proposal includes lowering the maximum individual donation to $400, upping the grant-matchable amount of local donations from $25 to $35, and lowering from $23,000 to $1,500 the amount participating candidates can contribute to the their own campaigns.
“I want more working-class people to be able to run for office” and prevent “wealthy people [from] buying elections,” Bhandary-Alexander said in support of the proposals. (Click here to read more about the proposal.)
Another proposal to is to include another citywide election, for city/town clerk, in the Democracy Fund program.
Heimer said successful mayoral candidates often end up spending upwards of $300,000 to run a campaign. Participants in the Democracy Fund who succeed in raising at least $70,000 on their own qualify for up to that $300,000 in public dollars, thus enabling more potential candidates to seek and obtain the office.
A sign of the fund’s success is that three of four likely Democratic mayoral candidates this year have pledged to participate in the system. So has a possible Republican mayoral candidate who participated in the voluntary program in the 2021 election.
Heimer said that the fund plans to hire an intern this summer to help conduct a deeper dive into assessing the program’s efficacy in promoting democracy. They plan to gather data on participation and outcomes from the fund so far and match them to similar data in other cities.
Click on the video to watch the full discussion with Heimer and Bhandary-Alexander on “Dateline New Haven.”
Paul Bass Photo
Tzippy Shmilovitz at WNHH FM.
Also on “Dateline” Thursday, an expert on Israeli politics spoke about why 100,000 people there have taken to the streets to demonstrate on behalf of a democracy they consider threatened by proposals of a new ultra-right-wing national government.
The expert — Tzippy Shmilovitz, an American correspondent for Israel’s largest-circulation print newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and who is based in New Haven — said that that 100,000 number isn’t as large as it appears at first. A far greater majority of the country has shifted right and backed the new national government, which is now proposing to rein in the judiciary. It seeks to allow a simple vote of the Knesset (legislature) to overrule Supreme Court rulings, and would allow the Knesset to in effect choose judges.
Shmilovitz agreed with protesters and Israeli President Isaac Herzog (whose role is largely ceremonial) that the proposals pose an “existential threat” to Israeli democracy.
“These ‘reforms’ would make the courts obsolete,” she said. “When the government has all the power, it isn’t a real democracy any more.”
Shmilovitz was asked about assertions by, among others, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that in fact the new proposals represent true democracy: Because a majority of the country has turned right-wing, it seeks to take decisions about rights of Palestinians, say, and expansion of Israeli settlements out of the hands of unelected judges, into the hands of elected representatives. (Both the left and the right have made similar arguments at different times in the United States when they have agreed or disagreed with landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions.)
Fundamental to democratic systems are checks and balances, including through a judiciary that’s independent of the legislative and executive branches and adheres to a code of law that protects minority rights, Shmilovitz responded.
“Netanyahu is trying to turn Israel into Hungary,” she said.
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with Tzippi Shmilovitz on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” including discussion about the potential impact of judicial changes on Netanyahu’s corruption charges and about how “we are here because of the occupation.” Click here to subscribe to“Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.